ArXiv, the physics open repository, is mentioned as the exception, and even this doesn’t get all of the papers researchers should, or would want to see. The Director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, says that the U.S. lags way behind Europe and other countries.

On a more hopeful note, the Johns Hopkins Data Conservancy project Director, Sayeed Choudhury, envisions a time when huge amounts of data will be available to researchers everywhere.

An Association of Research Libraries panel admits that progess is slow-going, but will come to pass.

"The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has become a founding member of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). COAR is an international not-for-profit association that aims to promote greater visibility and application of research outputs through global networks of Open Access (OA) digital repositories.

Inspired from the European DRIVER repositories project, which helps to enhance repository development, COAR takes this vision to an international scale. Founding members of the Confederation include members from North America, China, Japan and Europe. Joining COAR at the early stage of its development means members will be able to contribute to shaping the organisation’s objectives which will look at interoperability, raising awareness and promoting OA repositories, supporting the repository community and working with partners in closely related fields such as research management and publishing.

Open Access repositories seek to offer researchers and universities the chance to significantly increase the impact of their research outputs, with the potential for significant benefits for UK higher education and the economy and society more widely. The aim of COAR is to enhance and progress the provision, visibility and application of research outputs through global networks of Open Access repositories."

OpenHelix Resource Newsletter today proclaims the launch of an open access search and learn portal: openhelix.com web site to help researchers find the most relevant of the thousands of databases and analysis tools.

From their "About’ page:

OpenHelix allows "More efficient use of the most relevant resources means quicker and more effective research. OpenHelix empowers researchers by

providing a search portal to find the most relevant genomics resource and training on those resources.

distributing extensive and effective tutorials and training materials on the most powerful and popular genomics resourcs.

Jane Holmquist, the Astrophysics Librarian, will be demonstrating theLandolt-Bornstein Database, tomorrow, Friday morning, in Grand Central — as part of a trial that the University has from SpringerMaterials. She will answer any questions you may have in this second session of "Tool Time", a series featuring Library resources in astrophysics. (Group VI of L.B. is Astronomy and Astrophysics.)

"Scientific information services provider FIZ Karlsruhe, Germany, and Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, recently signed an agreement to further strengthen a partnership that began in 1983 with the foundation of STN International. STN International is an online service for patent and research information."

"Beginning January 2010, a team of scientists at FIZ Karlsruhe will perform value-added indexing of selected literature documents, according to the conventions used by CAS to make the information accessible within the CAS databases."

"FIZ Karlsruhe joins a global network of scientists whose expertise contributes to CAS database building. Teams of scientists in Ohio, India, China, Japan and elsewhere constitute the principal contributors to this more than 100 year-old resource."